Jeff Hurwit: The Art and Culture of Early Greece,
p. 58:
“Even with its bands and semicircles most of the surface
of the Protogeometric amphora is vacant, yet there is still no room for
a pictorial form. Imagelessness seems less of a fault in Protogeometric
than in Sub-Mycenaean: in the earlier style it signals the impoverishment
of the imagination, in the later style it tends only to emphasize the successful
negotiation of the abstract. The figure has no role to play in the Protogeometric
definition of structure and its intimations of volume. But one or two vase
painters discovered another role for it, and, in fact, Attic Protogeometric
is not completely imageless after all. Around the middle of the tenth century,
a long-legged, rubbery silhouette wandered onto the belly of an amphora
from the Kerameikos. It is nothing but a few quick arching brushstrokes,
but it is unmistakably a horse And it is a sign of the power of the pictorial
form that it seems to undermine its vast abstract environment rather than
to be overwhelmed by it. In the competiton for the spectator’s notice, the
array of concentric semicircles and wavy lines does not stand a chance even
against a tiny, hoofless silhouette that stands coyly off center. The horse,
then, repeatedly attracts the eye. But is really not an impertinent comment
on the abstract, nor is it an idle sketch. The vase it adorns held human
ashes, and the horse symbolizes the aristocratic rank of the dead, a man
wealthy enough to afford the expenses of a horse and therefore exalted enough
to ride it above the shoulders of other men as a hippeus (knight).
It is also possible that the horse alludes to the ritual procession known
as the ekphora and is an abbreviation for the team that drew the
funeral wagon to the pyre. In either case, the horse is a functional, ennobling
device, not a doodle.”
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